Gabe Newell afferma che il numero 3 non si può pronunciare e parla di Valve e del suo futuro

Gabe Newell, presidente di Valve, è sceso sulla terra per parlare a noi umani. No dai a parte i meme, il caro “Gaben” ha avuto la possibilità di rispondere ad alcune domande su Reddit che hanno toccato argomenti come progetti non ancora annunciati, Half-Life 3 e molto altro.

Prima di tutto si è parlato di diversi progetto non meglio noti mossi tutti dal noto engine Source 2:

“We are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving Dota 2 to the engine recently, we are are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.”

Sul futuro della compagnia, Gabe Newell ha detto che stanno provvedendo a distribuire un’esperienza sempre migliore anche grazie ai giochi con la Virtual Reality:

“The big thing right now is broadening the range of options we have in creating experiences. We think investing in hardware will give us those options. The knuckles controller is being designed at the same time as we’re designing our own VR games.

Much more narrowly, some of us are thinking about some of the AI work that is being hyped right now. Simplistically we have lots of data and compute capability that looks like the kinds of areas where machine learning should work well.

Personally I’m looking at research in brain-computer interfaces.”

“It changes all the time. There’s no fixed ratio, and people move to the project where they think they can create the most value.”

Parlando invece di Left 4 Dead, attualmente c’è stata una risposta molto positiva sul proseguire la serie:

“Products are usually the result of an intersection of technology that we think has traction, a group of people who want to work on that, and one of the game properties that feels like a natural playground for that set of technology and design challenges.

When we decided we needed to work on markets, free to play, and user generated content, Team Fortress seemed like the right place to do that. That work ended up informing everything we did in the multiplayer space.

Left 4 Dead is a good place for creating shared narratives.”

Altro argomento toccato sono i giochi preferiti di Gabe Newell tra quelli realizzati da Valve tra cui Portal 2 per il single-player, e DOTA 2 per il multiplayer ma ha specificato alcune cose su Half-Life:

“The issue with Half-Life for me is that I was involved in a much higher percentage of the decisions about the games, so it’s hard for me to look at them as anything other than a series of things I regret. There’s no information in my response about what we’ll do in the future. It’s simply easier for me to be a fan of things that in which I was less directive.”

“If you are involved in a game, everything ends up being a set of trade-offs. Anything in a game is a sacrifice of things not in the game. I just feel those more personally about Half-Life for a bunch of reasons.

And Xen.”

Il film di Portal/Half-Life prodotto da J.J. Abrams arriverà ma non è ancora noto quando. Mentre per quanto si tratta di Half-Life 3 e Half-Life 2 Episode 3, la risposta di Gabe Newell è stato molto particolare:

“The number 3 must not be said.”

 

Newell ha confermato che al momento ci sono molte probabilità di vedere nuove IP insinuarsi nell’universo di Half-Life/Portal:

“That’s right. Another way to think about this, and the way we talk about this internally, is that we prefer to communicate through our products. We are all pretty devoted to reading and listening to the community – everyone here believes it is an integral part of their job to do so. And when it comes time to respond, we generally use Steam – shipping updates that address issues or add functionality. Obviously this doesn’t work for everything. Working this way imposes latency on our communication – it takes longer to ship and update than to do a blog post. This can lead to the feeling of an echo chamber, where it seems like Valve isn’t listening. We’re always listening. So sometimes the latency is rough for everyone, including us when we want to address issues quickly. On balance we think it’s usually worth the trade-off.”